One evening not long ago, as I sat quietly reading by the fireside, a hooded stranger knocked on my door, handed me a crumpled missive, and quickly left. I would not have placed much credibility in his curious story, which I reprint below, had I not later noticed the wood was crushed where he brushed the door frame.
I have been walking the streets for days, virtually blind, in search of another creature of my kind. How I came here through the vastness of space I cannot tell, but I feel compelled to share something of my home. I will call our world Ironland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you. In Ironland everything is made of iron. No other elements exist. Picture a land with no air, no rain, no grass; no oxygen or hydrogen or carbon. Imagine a planet with only iron and what can be fashioned from iron. Knowing no other way of life, we consider this state of affairs perfectly natural.
Our world is far simpler than yours. First of all, chemistry is unheard of, there being no other elements available to react with iron. I have been astonished at the myriad chemical phenomena you have: photosynthesis, battery power, taste. Not even our science-fiction writers have imagined such things. Still, we enjoy some compensations. You will grasp at once how durable our structures are, compared to yours. Without corrosion and decay, our splendid houses stand forever and maintain their initial gray-white color. I would think that architects in your world, especially those anxious that their buildings last a thousand years, must find oxidation a frightful nuisance. Indeed, aging of all kinds proceeds more swiftly on a world with chemistry, although this still does not explain why your creatures rarely live beyond one hundred Earthly years.
You may wonder what distinguishes the animate from the inanimate in Ironland, and I will tell you. We experience nature on its simplest terms and have decided that life, in its essence, consists of information—and mechanisms for expressing that information. Now iron, as you know, has magnetic properties. Some years ago, our scientists discovered that the microscopic magnetic regions inside our living matter are oriented according to definite patterns. That is, if you think of each of these regions as being a magnet, then the little north poles in animate matter point up or down in very particular arrangements, analogous to the sequences of dots and dashes in your Morse code or the on and off switches in your computers. Any piece of information can be reduced to such a sequence and stored. In lifeless forms, like rocks and hammers, the tiny internal magnets point haphazardly, with little relationship to each other. No greater magnetic information resides within a rock than in a word of letters taken randomly from the alphabet.
Magnetism in our society is akin to money in yours. We base our status on it. But the Board of Magnetometers, curse them, has more or less dictated the system. The lower classes, like welders, are permitted an overall magnetic field of no more than 100 gauss. (So that you will understand me, I have converted our magnetic units to yours. One gauss, if I am not mistaken, is about twice the magnetic field strength of your planet.) The middle classes, like sculptors and doctors, are allowed up to 1,000 gauss. Some members of the upper classes—I know one politician in particular—boast magnetic fields as high as 10,000 gauss and more. Now, I’ll take you into my confidence, but this must never get back to my world. Some of us have noticed that with increasing status comes increasing stupidity. Eventually we realized why. You see, to get high overall magnetization, the microscopic magnetic regions within a person must line up, with most of the little north poles pointing in the same direction. Otherwise, they’ll partly cancel each other, reducing the overall magnetic strength. But as a greater number of the microscopic magnets are restricted in their orientation, less are available to store information. It’s like restricting a larger and larger fraction of the letters in a word to be the single letter a. The extreme case is when all the microscopic magnets point in the same direction, producing a maximum magnetic field of about 20,000 gauss. At this point, all intelligence has been abandoned in favor of status.
I myself carry around 300 gauss, which in my opinion is enough to make ends meet but not so much as to go to my head. I am a writer. Often, I have felt grateful for this one modest talent, as I am somewhat homely and definitely lacking in social graces. My dear mate was recently certified at 310 gauss, although she deserves more. I noticed her fine mettle the first day we met, at the foundry. When I say noticed, you must appreciate that all our sense perceptions are magnetic and operate on much the same principles as some of your metal detectors.
I suppose I’d better explain something about our sexuality. Roughly speaking, your maleness and femaleness correspond in our land to the north and south poles of a magnet. But since any magnet has both poles, every person in Ironland is bisexual. Depending on how you’re standing or sitting in relation to someone else, you can find that individual extremely attractive or repulsive. As you can imagine, courtships have to be handled with great delicacy, and you can still slip into an awkward position after many years of marriage.
There is a saying in our world that wayward spouses can usually be turned around. But sometimes one encounters a whole group of disagreeable, misdirected people, and that leads to war. Regrettably, warfare in Ironland suffers for want of strong weapons. Without chemical reactions, we lack chemical explosives. Oh, what I could do with some of your gunpowder or TNT back home.
Much worse, we’ve failed miserably to build nuclear explosives. I must admit, however, the reason is not without its fascination. As you well know, the particles in atomic nuclei interact with two kinds of forces: a repulsive electrical force, acting between the protons, and an attractive nuclear force, acting between both protons and neutrons. The first force is like a compressed spring while the second like a stretched spring, each poised to snap back to its natural position, releasing energy in the process. Unfortunately, the two kinds of springs pull in opposite directions, so when energy is gained from one it is lost from the other. To get an explosion, of course, more energy must be released than absorbed. Your fission bombs produce energy by splitting nuclei. This method only works for the heavy nuclei, like uranium. On the other hand, for light nuclei, such as hydrogen, net energy is produced by joining them together. You call weapons made in this way fusion bombs. Now that I understand these things, it is not so remarkable there should be a special atomic nucleus unluckily caught right in the middle—neither light enough to yield net energy by fusion, nor heavy enough to do so by fission. In effect, its stretched and compressed springs completely cancel themselves in either direction. That barren and singular nucleus is none other than iron, the sole element of our world.
Nevertheless, being people of some intelligence and resourcefulness, we’ve found ways of doing away with each other. One can always heat an enemy to oblivion. When the temperature of iron exceeds 768 Celsius, still well below its melting point, the substance loses all its magnetism. Under such heat, the tiny internal magnets become totally disoriented. It is death by loss of all knowledge, sense of self, and status—but without destruction of material. Rather humane, don’t you agree?
We are a cultured people. Our poets cannot write of oceans, but they have mused on the latent stillness of low temperatures, the texture of a cubic lattice shifted, the inner seething of magnetic storms. Our artists cannot paint, but they have created winding sculptures whose forces tingle helically. Confined to the most primitive form of the material universe, we have yet risen to great heights of expression.
Now you know a bit about Ironland. I would write far more, but time does not permit. Already, I am rusting in your wretched air and must depart. Good-bye.